Dreaming in Hindi (10 page)

"
Mexican?
" Alka offered.

"
Yes!
" I said. At home, many times, I had heated up rice. Other times, microwaved beans.

"
So you can cook Mexican for us here?
" she said, glancing at the stove. Damn.

"
No, I need the book,
" I said.

"
Book?
" She looked puzzled. No one used cookbooks in India. They learned the repertoire by the age of eight.

"
Haan. I need the book of the kitchen in order to cook Mexican,
" I said.

Alka gave me a nice-try smile. "
Good answer,
" I swear she said.

When I finally made it back to the room, I looked around for the dictionary. "Jigri. Having to do with the liver," it said. More rocking enlightenment coming out of India: Piers and the man were just livers.

 

"
ARAMSE SONA
," Meena says, strolling into the darkness to lock the gate, as I stand at the door and fumble for the key and let the language break over me:
Aramse sona:
Sleep comfortably. Before I could detect the women's kindnesses through tone; now they take form: I can hear them. "Sleep with ease": that's it precisely, and she says it with ease. It's the first time I've heard it, the thousandth time at least she's said it in her life. It's just something you say, but it has the effect of curling me into the family. "
Do baje,
" she reminds me: "Be back by two tomorrow," for the
mendhi
application. The festival of Navratri is coming up. We're having our hands painted with henna, a holiday ritual.

Do baje.
Alka and I sit on scratchy jute mats as Meena and the girls look on. We hold our hands out to the mendhi wali. Flowers, thatched hearts, paisleys bloom on our palms. "
Thandi?
" Alka says: "Cold?" I panic. It is. It's the same sensation as a nurse swabbing li-docaine on skin for a biopsy, for a catheter, for another catheter, for a fourth. Neurons that fire together wire together; it's not my fault; that's how I've been wired, am wired; everything that happens to us changes our brains, I was just telling Helaena. "The machine is continually repairing and remaking itself based on experience," a neurologist I'd interviewed had said. In India, I'm replacing hatches on my chest with arabesque swirls on my hands. Rips turn to hearts turn to flowers.

"Mendhi looks so good on white skin," the youngest girl, Meenal, observes.

"But if I'm white, what are you?" I ask. Our skin is nearly the same.

"Uhhh." She thinks. "I'm okay."

Meenal looks just like the grandmother, exact same face, only smaller and unlined. They're like points on a diagram of Indian cultural history. The grandmother sits on the floor to eat. She wears the same yellow sari every day, does not have a fixed birthday. When it's the full moon in the second week of August, it's her birthday. Meenal in jeans in a chair at the breakfast table speaks perfect English, lightly accented in a way that sounds British, though she's never been a hundred miles from Udaipur. Except once, they went to Kashmir. "When we were there, then we were so white," she says. Her birthday, without fail, is March 9 every year.

The children feed us grapes while Alka and I lounge like nautch dancing girls, waiting for our hands to dry. We talk about everything, except
this thing
that has happened. The wives never ask how I feel, and I don't want them to. I'm in India, where, right now, I've always been, where I'll always be, till I'm alone at night.

At night, I lie in bed and worry that we've become a little like the Raj, the other students and I: dumb to the ways the homeland's been altered, loyal to old notions, too floridly assured now, out of sync and out of time. In the right here and now, we're citizens of the America we left at the beginning of September, a country still blessed by sheltering geography, a country that's impregnable and will always stay fortified. Until the hissing neon light fades the henna on my skin. Then my veins go white as the walls fill in with the exact and obliterating images.

Remarkable how much can hinge on a syllable. One afternoon in early October, the Jain wives appeared at my door with news: something was on for the night. Something big.
What,
I tried to make out. "Sudesh Bhosle," Meena said, then she and Alka spoke so fast, I had to squint to understand. At length, the meaning went through. A Bombay recording artist had come to town. The Lions Club, or "Loins Club," as it was pronounced locally, was hosting a concert.

"Every song in Bollywood," Rajesh, Dad 2, shouted from the doorway. "This man has sung every song!" From the way he stabbed the air on "every," it was clear we were talking glitterati crowds.

"
Jaayegi?
" I heard Alka say: "You will go?" The prospect of three hours of Bollywood crooning was about as appealing as a polka weekend, but feeling guilty because I hadn't been around much, I said, "
Jaungi":
"I will go." I was slightly surprised when an exchange of glances followed, and Rajesh bolted for the driveway. When later in the day he presented me with a ticket, I was puzzled to see it was stamped "1,000 rupees," not the 500 Alka had quoted me earlier.

Alka and Meena in full jewels looked smashing when we gathered in the driveway at dusk. Rajkumar's hair was oiled to liquescent beauty. Anticipation ran high in the car as Rajesh, wearing a new orange shirt, reminisced about Mr. Bhosle's hits.

At the concert grounds, near the palace, Rajkumar handed the usher their tickets. Then all four Jains shooed me away.

"Go, Kathy," Rajesh said, scooping air toward the stage.

"There!" Rajkumar said. He smiled as he gesticulated. "There, Kathy. That way. Tonight you are first." As an usher led me toward the front, I deciphered the situation. I'd screwed up on an "
egi.
" Alka hadn't said "
Jaayegi": "You
will go?" She'd said, "
Jaenge": "We're
going." She'd stopped by to tell me they wouldn't be around, and I'd said, essentially,
Yeah, well, you're taking me.
I should have known something was up when, on handing me the ticket, the usually snorty Rajesh was sweet. "You are VVP, Kathy," he'd said. "Not a very important person, a very, very important person. Free cold drinks are." After scrambling into last-minute prices, he was not getting stuck with the seat.

Now here I was, by myself in a sea of men in kurtas, of women in saris and their best thick gold, staring at a stage empty except for a banner,
LIONS CLUB UDAIFUR: SUDESH BHOSLE NITE
, and a smaller sign,
YOU CAN'T BEAT A BAJAJ. THINK OF BAJAJ AUTO
. Over the next hour, I thought of Bajaj often as I read and reread the sign, slapped at mosquitoes, grew more and more lonesome. There's nothing like blocks of India's firm family units to make you feel absolutely alone.

But yet, even so, until a dry-ice machine began to fumigate the stage, there was a certain dark charm to the scene. Bats flitted overhead. The palace rose like a Halloween mask behind me. Then the smoke-master twirling-light effects began, turning the proscenium into a pulsating swamp, making it hard to brood, though I tried. I could assemble sentences if people would just give me time, I thought, but how was I supposed to assemble and talk simultaneously? Oops, now twirling and spinning lights, two separate sets, quite an effect on dry ice—like a desperately signaling spaceship in a cloud. I gave up the black mood. But if I squeezed my brain and hung on, I considered, cheering, I could last three, four sentences now before getting bumped. And I was getting a kind of pidgin going that the Jains were down with. And—up ahead, shapes were moving in the gloaming. You could see the tops of heads.

The swelling clouds flattened. Band members found chairs. The wet-sari, hair-flipping film sound began. And this, I reflected, is what can happen if you miss so much as one thin syllable. You end up at Sudesh Bhosle Nite.

 

MY DAYS THEN
were shaped by these absences. What language I did have was still too slight to let me assemble much of anything, though with each word learned, a world was coming further into view. My gray-haired friend Renee, the expat from Brooklyn, no longer lived near a hotel called the Chandra Prakash. Now that I knew what the name meant, her apartment was by
The Moonlight.
But entry into this world was slow and blocked by negative forces: The phonemes, the sounds I strained to hear but couldn't. The words that wouldn't cross over (literally; the word "translate" means "to carry across"). That would be 90 percent of the total, in the philosopher John Locke's estimate. "If we ... exactly compare different languages," he wrote, "we shall find that, though they have words which in translations and dictionaries are supposed to answer one another, yet there is scarce one of ten."

In any new language, you discover missing words, as revealing as the ones that exist. In Hindi, I soon learned, you couldn't say "appointment" or "minute" or "second," except with the English loan versions. In Udaipur, where only 50 percent of the homes had phones then, you didn't need to. "If a people have no word for something, either it does not matter to them or it matters too much to talk about," the sociologist Edgar Z. Friedenberg said, and here appointments didn't matter. People stopped by. "They'll come to your house at six-thirty in the morning. Once I came back from dinner to find a friend sitting in the living room reading a magazine," Renee told me.

Each missing word was a shock to discover, one thing more that had become a figment of my imagination. For if you can't express something to anyone around you, doesn't it exist only in your mind? Each missing word was a loss, a piece of the old world falling away. I began taking note of all the fragments that had vanished: "handsome," "paint," the verb "to wonder," the verb "to own." It was now literally impossible to own anything. In Hindi, new shoes, bread, your car could only be "in your direction":
kepas.
I loved the construction's nod to impermanence till I used it so often, it became just a figure of speech. And one perhaps best left unexamined, though Helaena did from time to time: In India, there's no female orgasm, not to speak of. "Orgasm" applied only to men. "Interested" was not a word. There weren't separate terms for "marriage" and "wedding." Your
shaadi
was your wedding and your marriage, a small distinction, but in the early days of my marriage to Hindi, I was acutely aware of what was missing. "Privacy" most of all.

Once, on contracting a bug, I hailed a rickshaw to take me to the doctor's. The driver was uncertain of the address, so he waved over a pedestrian, who looked at the slip of paper, looked at me, leaned into the back. Was it my head? the man wanted to know. Just a slight fever, I answered. What about my throat, did that hurt? No, that was fine, I replied. Had I taken anything for it? he inquired. I gave a quick nod yes. Allopathic or naturopathic? he asked. "
Mujhe jaana hai,
" I said, which loosely translates: "I know this is a silly idea, but I was thinking we could leave some questions for the doctor."

"There's no word for 'privacy' in any of the Indian languages," we'd been told during orientation, though I surely would have figured that out pretty fast on my own. A month into moving here, I'd begun to suspect that the whole town belonged to the Central Intelligence caste. "Madam, you are living in Sector Eleven?" a rickshaw driver asked. "My friend said he took you there from the bank two weeks ago." "Madam, who was that man who walked you home last night?" the candy shop owner inquired. I had to think, then remembered—just Swami-ji. "He is my teacher," I said with an extreme annoyance that went unnoticed. The guy was too busy nodding, as if calculating implications.

"There are three things you can't hide—happiness, a cough, and love," a Hindi proverb goes, but I think the list got truncated in the retelling. In Udaipur, in any Indian town, the list could be amended to include where you are going in this heat, how much you paid for that lamp, why you were wearing a fancy sari two nights ago, whether you've put on weight. The notion of off-limits is alien. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that here, as Indologist Diana L. Eck writes, "the 'individual' as we think of it in the West does not exist. A person thinks of himself or herself not as a singular entity, but rather as part of a larger interdependent whole, in which parts mirror one another in an infinite, intricate pattern." Or maybe it is because, as a friend said, "in India we share everything, even privacy."

Eventually, I'd come to like it when a cybercafe wala would boot up the computer and automatically log me on to my server. I'd grow accustomed to strangers on the street giving me updates on my appearance: "I am thinking your skin is looking dry?" a man I'd never seen before said, as I was waiting at a corner to cross the street. "You have not been applying oil?" Though I continued to draw some lines, as on the evening I came home to find the Jains debating how much money I had in the bank. "No, you misunderstand," Dad 2 said when I refused to answer. "We don't want to take your money. We just really, really, really want to know," he said, as all ten family members nodded emphatically, in complete unison.

 

MUCH FARTHER OUT
along the spidery web of time, long gone from the Jains' now, I begin a list of words missing from English:
Leelaa:
the acts of a deity performed for pleasure.
Vidya:
translated as "knowledge," but which a friend explained as "having characteristics of knowledge but not itself knowledge. It's symbolic of God's world. A person who knows
vidya
knows everything." And
advait:
roughly, non-duality; and
aanand:
broadly, joy or bliss; and then I toss the paper away. Departure's looming. I can't bear to see, spelled out in black and white, what will become unspeakable once I cross back. Transcendence: that's what I'm going to have to lose.

 

RENEE PHONES TO
see about an outing. She's been invited to a performance at a deaf school at 3
P.M.
Do I want to go? My afternoon plans so far extend to sitting in the kitchen and exclaiming over the neighbor's baby, so yeah, I say; sure, I'd like to.